“Cancer happens in everyone,” Dr. Jacques Miller, who a lifetime ago discovered the role of the thymus, told me as we discussed the meaning of the immune system and life. The brain will fail, the organs will shut down, the lungs will flood. Some of these will owe to breakdown of our defenses, some to an overwhelming pathogen, but some, like cancer, will arise from a complicity of the immune system itself. The reason is that the immune system hasn’t evolved to defend us as individuals. It has evolved to defend our genetic material and the species as a whole. It does an extraordinary job of
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